Mike, I totally accept that your discipline suffers from practitioners of "psychoceramics", a field of study involving "cracked pots" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_S._Carberry ? tomorrow, as every Friday the 13th, it's "Josiah Stinkney Carberry day"). It's probably true of many disciplines, and it's certainly a well-known phenomenon in physics, where highly fantastic theories about the universe and everything abound. Yet ArXiv seems to be able to keep those crackpots out with a fairly simple ? and cheap ? endorsement system: http://arxiv.org/help/endorsement. Would this really be impossible in archaeology? It may well not be completely fail-safe, but then, what in life is? To all intents and purposes, we know that ArXiv works.
Jan Velterop On 12 Jan 2012, at 16:46, Michael Smith wrote: > I would not presume to talk about the value of peer review for all of > science, but for some fields it is absolutely essential. I am a > archaeologist, and we desperately need peer review to weed out papers by two > groups of authors (many of whom can write scholarly-sounding and > scholarly-looking papers). First we lunatics who would like to think they are > part of the scholarly discipline. They are into Maya prophesies for 2012, > boatloads of Egyptians who (supposedly) showed the Incas how to mummify the > dead, phony pyramids in the Balkans, and the like. Some of these people > write books and articles that appear to be scholarly, but are not. The second > group is more insidious. These are scholars with valid degrees who have a > very non-scientific epistemology, producing stories of the past with little > plausibility. Taking a more humanities-oriented approach, they are willing to > propose interpretations that the more scientifically-minded of us consider > baseless speculation. > > High-energy physics presumably has fewer lunatics and hangers-on than > archaeology, and they are probably easier to spot. We desperately need peer > review to keep some sort of sanity in our field. > > Mike > > Michael E. Smith, Professor > School of Human Evolution & Social Change > Arizona State University > www.public.asu.edu/~mesmith9 > _______________________________________________ > GOAL mailing list > GOAL at eprints.org > http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
